With the advent of more powerful communication technologies, the use of cross-border collaborative project teams has increased. For example, it is not uncommon in the software development industry to have teams of developers and management spread across the globe. While such collaborative project teams typically enjoy the benefit of being able to draw upon efficient resources, the remoteness between team members can give rise to significant challenges that may significantly undercut, or entirely overwhelm, the efficiencies gained.
For example, where the project at hand comprises complex work involving a significant need for interaction between team members, remote collaborators that are not co-located with project management often have a difficult time establishing contextual knowledge relevant to the project. For example, on a software development project, a developer in India may not fully appreciate the project requirements worked out through face-to-face meetings with the customer by U.S. based project managers. On the other hand, a project manager may not be able to quickly appreciate the subtleties of a technological issue encountered by the development team without significantly interacting with the developers. Such inefficiencies can be compounded by the fact that different team members may have different levels of experience and knowledge, thereby making it difficult to maintain quality. Additionally, differences in time zones between team members may create substantial lags in response time when critical issues arise, and provide a limited amount of time in which multiple team members may conference together. Further still, differences in culture or language may create difficulties when trying to understand implied instructions from team management.
Prior art solutions to such collaboration difficulties tend to be ad hoc approaches using existing, disparate content repositories and communication and tracking tools. For example, project team members may attempt to use emails as the primary channel for communicating issues as they arise or to use issue tracking software to maintain historical context regarding how such issues were addressed. While such tools are individually suited for the particular tasks for which they are designed, collectively, they typically are unable to provide the necessary level of structure and support to maximize efficiency of the collaboration team. Further, existing tools that may contain workflow functionality to formalize and structure standard types of communication, e.g., issue tracking, risk management, document versioning, do not account for informal communications that are necessary to perform collaborative work. Stated another way, there currently are no systems or tools that provide coordinated operation between such separate collaboration tools. A consequence of this shortcoming is a lack of context. As used herein ‘context’ comprises any information that provides greater understanding of the subject matter of a given communication or deliverable artifact, such as a document or portion of code, beyond the actual content of the item, e.g., historical information concerning a specific issue, identification of specific parties having an interest in the specific subject matter, classification of the subject matter, etc. Such context in communications between team members typically ensures more meaningful communications, e.g., the difference between awareness of the content of a communication and a true understanding of the implications of such content. Therefore, a collaboration system or suite of tools that overcome these problems would represent an advancement in the art.